Unholy Fury (3 page)

These were prescient questions, and it was a brave politician to speak such language in the febrile environment of the Cold War, particularly
in a parliament where those who dared question American intentions were quickly denounced as disloyal. Although Whitlam was expressing a traditional Labor fear of being automatically caught up in a war to support its great and powerful allies, his remarks came in the wake of the cease-fire in Korea and as momentum was gathering to end the French intervention in Indochina. In essence, he was pointing out the dangers for Australia in aligning itself too closely to US policy; highlighting the risk of becoming involved in another war in the very region so vital to Australia's postwar security interests; and asking whether the much-vaunted spirit of reciprocity in the treaty had any real meaning.

Two decades later, in July 1973, Whitlam and Nixon would meet in Washington DC as the leaders of their respective countries: the Republican president in his second term, the Labor Party leader as Australia's twenty-first prime minister. But at that meeting they faced a very different global outlook. The rigid bipolarity of the Cold War was coming under strain. In its place was emerging a new multipolar world, with separate if overlapping centres of power. Russia and China had split and were publicly brawling, while the European Community had become a separate centre of economic power. Japan was emerging as the second greatest economy in the world and therefore a potential global power in its own right. The OPEC countries were a force to be reckoned with, while Asian, African and Caribbean nations were pressing their own claims in the United Nations and elsewhere. Although the United States and the Soviet Union retained the capacity to annihilate each other with their arsenal of nuclear weapons, the once stark ideological fault lines of the Cold War had at least been substantially qualified.

Even so, the events of twenty years before, when Nixon had been in Australia, remained something of a point of reference for both men. During their meeting in the Oval Office, Nixon noted: ‘Whatever our problems may be today, it is a better world today that it was back in 1953'. Whitlam too said that he remembered listening to Nixon's Canberra address: ‘I knew then', he added, ‘that a glittering future lay before you'.
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Never mind that Nixon's political star was fading rapidly at this time in the wake of damaging revelations over the Watergate scandal: Whitlam's sweet talk could not mask the mutual suspicion or allay the deep antagonism which had developed between them. By July 1973, those differences, and in particular explosive disagreements over the prosecution of the war in Vietnam, would ultimately plunge the American–Australian alliance into its greatest ever crisis. Their meeting in Washington that July followed a period of stress in the relationship unknown previously or since. And yet earlier that decade these two protagonists had developed the same sense of strategic foresight to end Communist China's isolation. Now, in the hands of these two powerful, enigmatic and ultimately flawed leaders, an alliance that had endured the heights of the Cold War was veering dangerously off course and seemed headed for destruction. Far from seeing Australia as being ‘on the right side', Nixon now saw the country as a virtual deserter from the west, even placing it second on his so-called ‘shit list' of least favourite countries.

But the clash between Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon over the end of the Vietnam war and the shape of a new Asia was by no means ordained by fate. Nor were the icy winds that blew through the Australian-American relationship in the early 1970s simply due to the ideological differences between a Republican president and a Labor prime minister, though differing ideas about politics and international affairs were certainly a factor. Indeed, in more than one respect, these two leaders had a great deal in common. Both saw the opportunities this more fluid world created, and both had the boldness to seize the moment and so recast their nation's foreign policies, not least in welcoming détente with the Soviet Union and reaching an accommodation with Communist China. Both Whitlam and Nixon knew that their nation's destiny lay in Asia. Both, too, were leaders prepared to stare down their parties and overturn the conventional wisdom. And although Whitlam had not tasted serious political defeat, he too, like Nixon had wandered through the bleak woods of the political wilderness for long enough. But these leaders differed profoundly on the way in which the new strategic context
was to be managed and shaped. What emerged were two very different approaches to managing the end of the Cold War in East Asia. In contrast to Richard Nixon's commitment to power politics, Gough Whitlam saw the world from a progressive point of view.

TROUBLE IN THE ALLIANCE

This book tells the story of that rift. It portrays a bitter clash between the two men and their respective visions of the world, exposing for the first time the depth of frustration and mistrust on both sides of the Pacific. The war in Vietnam was by no means the only sticking point between Australia and the United States in this era. Across a broad range of issues, all of which were central to how both nations saw their role in the world and their future in Asia, it became apparent that the harmony of aims and interests that characterised the alliance during the Cold War had come to an abrupt and acrimonious end. This divergence was at its sharpest and most intense from the time Gough Whitlam became prime minister in late 1972 until his visit to Washington the following year, but the controversy stirred up by these early tensions continued to trouble the alliance until the middle of the decade. It is worth recalling that of all the international ‘crises' that occupied his time as CIA director in this period—flashpoints in the Middle East, coups in Cyprus and Portugal, and a nuclear explosion in India—William Colby felt compelled to add to his list of potential troubles ‘a left-wing and possibly antagonistic government in Australia'.
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Indeed, as this book will show, there is evidence to suggest that Nixon and senior administration officials in Washington, in the light of what they saw as unreasonable truculence and intransigence on the part of a junior ally, and fearful that the continued presence of US intelligence facilities on Australian soil was under grave threat, gave more than a passing thought to abandoning ANZUS altogether. Until now, Australians have not known the true force of this American frustration and fury.

The dramatic deterioration in relations was most apparent in the realm of foreign affairs, where Whitlam wanted Australia to exercise more freedom of movement both inside and outside the
alliance. This included support for new forms of regional forums that did not include the United States, and zones of peace and neutrality in South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean that aimed to reduce superpower rivalry in Australia's backyard. But the friction in the alliance also had consequences in the economic sphere, where the new Labor government's narrative of ‘buying back the farm' imposed more stringent conditions on American investment in the country and pressured American multinational companies to appoint local, rather than American, chief executives. And in keeping with his desire to identify with the ‘new nationalism', Whitlam also demanded more Australian content on television and asked that American-owned cinema chains show more home-grown product in Australia.
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Tempers on both sides frayed. The cooperative spirit of the Cold War alliance was quickly replaced by a flurry of insults and barbs flowing freely back and forth across the Pacific. Some of Whitlam's senior ministers, their throats inflamed by the president's decision to bomb North Vietnam in December 1972, accused the White House of being run by ‘maniacs' and ‘thugs'; Nixon labelled the Australian leader a ‘peacenik' while Henry Kissinger dismissed Whitlam, with barely concealed contempt, as hardly a ‘heavyweight'. The spat even spilled onto the waterfront, where for a period of nearly two weeks over the Christmas-New Year period of 1972–73, Australian maritime unions refused to unload visiting American ships—a move duly reciprocated by their counterparts in the United States. Elsewhere, an American businessman—the managing director of Chrysler, no less—was sent home in disgrace for criticising Labor's new policies. The tensions even made an appearance at the annual Logies television awards in early 1973, when American actor Glenn Ford, visiting the country as a guest of honour for the ceremony, refused to shake hands with the minister for the media, the Labor stalwart Doug McLelland. On stage, Ford was overheard telling him: ‘I don't like what your government is saying about my country and the way it is trying to put American actors out of work.'
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Never before had such an atmosphere of pervasive acrimony cast so long a shadow over the relationship.

The timing was critical. A new, beamingly confident government in Canberra faced an administration in Washington bleeding from war weariness and political scandal. In late 1972 Gough Whitlam was enjoying his first heady moments of real power. Prime minister at last, he had won office on the back of a promise to ‘take Australia forward to her rightful, proud, secure and independent place in the future of our region'.
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The new leader wanted to reshape Australian foreign policy and refashion the relationship with the United States. For him, the world emerging from the ashes of Vietnam offered an exciting opportunity to recast the national image and lift Australia's reputation abroad. Whitlam wanted to transcend the Cold War mentality with its fears and phobias and make Australia more truly a part of its own region. What his country needed, he was to tell one American audience, was an ‘ideological holiday'.
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He wanted a ‘new maturity' in the alliance and a ‘new internationalism' in world affairs. There was to be ‘real and deep' change to how Australia would perceive and interpret its national interests and international obligations, its alliances and friendships.
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But this was no will o' the wisp dalliance with the levers of policy. It was neither a language designed to make Australians simply feel good about themselves, nor a brash, raw nationalism chafing against its great ally. As Opposition leader, Whitlam had patiently constructed a coherent, alternative vision of Australian foreign affairs; as prime minister, he was single-minded in his determination to lock it into place.

Whitlam may have been less emotional about the US alliance, but he was not inclined to indulge in the anti-American sermons characteristic of some on the Labor left. In the 1950s and 1960s he had been a regular visitor to Washington and had developed a relationship of trust with American leaders and officials. Although his intellectual interests were first and foremost in the classics, with an imagination fired by the ancient Greek virtue of
arete
and the Roman
humanitas
—the pursuit of excellence and an abiding enthusiasm for civilisation—he professed deep American sympathies. When Whitlam spoke of his political philosophy, he argued that the core value linking the modern parties of social reform to the American and French revolutions was their shared ‘tradition of optimism about the possibility of human
reason'.
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During a Fourth of July speech delivered while he was prime minister, he identified the birth of the American republic as a ‘watershed in human history'. In the two centuries since, he added, ‘nothing has diminished the power and splendour of the words of the American declaration of independence'.
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Whitlam had also expressed his admiration for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies of the 1930s, which pulled the United States out of the worldwide depression.
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And when the purchase of Jackson Pollock's
Blue Poles
caused a sensation in 1974 on account of its $1.3 million price tag and abstract expressionist style, he spoke up for the place of American modern art in western culture, heralding Pollock's work as ‘a key painting of the twentieth century'.
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Moreover, as subsequent chapters will show, Whitlam had spent much time in Opposition giving shape to a new understanding of how the American alliance could work better for a more self-reliant Australia.

NIXON: THE ENIGMA

Richard Nixon, too, was a politician determined to make his mark on American foreign policy. The first American president to have grown up in California, he had, like Whitlam, also spent time in the South West Pacific during World War II, serving with the US Navy in, amongst other regional locales, Bougainville. The Australian Ambassador in Washington at the time of Nixon's inauguration recalled that the new president ‘used to wave his finger … and say “tell your government that I was born on the shores of the Pacific and that's where my heart lies. I remember what you did during World War Two and I will always be your friend”'.
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That wartime camaraderie, however, was born of another time and forged under very different circumstances. If Nixon's memories of Australia were rooted in the experience of that conflict, it is little wonder that he found Whitlam's idea of a ‘new Australia'—which indulged in little sentimentalism over the struggles of the past—somewhat hard to swallow. In short, the United States' ‘comfortable familiarity' with Australia, heralded by one State Department official in the middle of 1969, was to become decidedly uncomfortable, and the country virtually unknowable, during the Nixon presidency.
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The American president had a very different character, temperament and outlook to Prime Minister Whitlam. Nixon described himself once as an ‘introvert in an extrovert profession'.
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The memorable opening line of his political memoirs: ‘I was born in a house my father built', evoked his humble origins in suburban Yorba Linda, but also placed him squarely in the Log Cabin to White House tradition.
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It could not conceal, though, the fierce, relentless desire throughout his life to get ahead and prove to the privileged elite around him that he could succeed. Between 1946 and 1972 Nixon ran for high office on nine occasions.
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In his early battles to win a seat in the US Congress, first in the House of Representatives, then in the Senate, he displayed a ruthless ability to tap into the American public's growing fears of the threat communism posed to their way of life. With what has been described as a ‘visceral feel for what voters wanted to hear', his first political campaigns readily impugned the loyalty of his opponents, depicting them as agents of communist influence or, at the very least, advocates of creeping socialism. Nixon combined crude populism and demagoguery with lofty rhetorical calls to arms.
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While he made his name on the wave of McCarthyist witch-hunting, he was always quick to distinguish himself from the more extreme rhetoric of the Republican senator.